how about they get a better prize... Anne Applebaum got a Pulitzer

The famed “Pulitzer Prize” is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a war-propaganda peddler who helped the US acquire its first overseas territories in the 1890s:

The Spanish-American War, what boosters called a “splendid little war,” began in 1898. … President McKinley sent a warship to Cuba as a precaution, but in February 1898 that ship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana, killing 250 U.S. sailors. The cause of the explosion was unknown — and it would later be revealed to have been an accident — but both Hearst and Pulitzer published a cable from the captain of the battleship to the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, informing him that the disaster was no accident. (The cable was later revealed to be a fake.) [1]

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/